


slow dumb show

by simplyprologue



Category: World Wrestling Entertainment
Genre: Angst, Developing Relationship, Hurt/Comfort, Kayfabe Compliant, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-07
Updated: 2017-11-07
Packaged: 2019-01-30 16:09:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,991
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12656940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/simplyprologue/pseuds/simplyprologue
Summary: Dean's stuck in his head. Seth is trying to figure out his heart. (Post-RAW 11/6/17.)





	slow dumb show

**Author's Note:**

> **A/N:** Well, I've never done this before, but eight year old me would be proud. Title and lyrics are from "Slow Show," by The National. That match was emotionally exhausting and I'm still mad about it.

_I wanna hurry home to you_  
_Put on a slow, dumb show for you and crack you up_  
_So you can put a blue ribbon on my brain_  
_God, I'm very, very frightening, I'll overdo_ _it_  
  


* * *

   
There’ll be a rematch, Dean thinks. It’s one of the many thoughts in his brain right now, a hazy muddle of sensation and feeling and words. There’ll be a rematch, but it’s all messed up with Cesaro’s arms locked around his waist, the canvas under his nails as he tried to claw his way towards Seth while the referee windmilled his arm to a three count. The immediate confusion and the blistering anger, the shouts of the crowd as Sheamus drop kicked Seth in the head. What if he had turned around, what if he had remained in the ring, not gone for a chair?

There’ll be a rematch, but it means nothing when the doctor tells Seth he doesn’t have a concussion, but to lay low for a day or two. A bruise is blooming on Seth’s temple, the first flush of a wound, red and pink and fringing with purple. Thoughtlessly, disgust roiling in his belly, Dean folds his arms across his chest, folds in on himself entirely.

“Well,” Seth mumbles, pressing an ice pack to his head. “Better me than you.”

Dean twists his lips into a silent snarl.

“I owed you one, at least,” Seth continues as they leave the arena, heading towards the car that will take them back to their hotel room. “Hell in a Cell, and that’s just — just the beginning. Or the ending. Depends on how you look at it, I guess.”

_Owed you one,_ Dean echoes inside his head. It gets twisted and warped, becomes a cruel mockery imposed over his memory of last week’s match, his own body supine in the ring after Kane’s tombstone — and then Seth’s warm weight on top of him, his bad shoulder cradled between their chests. The stretched-out seconds of warmth and security, the stinging pain of his elbow and back, then the bereftness, the following fear as Seth was lifted off of him. The reverberation as Seth was slammed down feet from him. Their hands, reaching towards each other blindly.

The tag titles are gone, the Survivor Series match with it.

His head is a shit show, and he knows it, can’t do anything about it right now. Can’t do anything but sit stock-still in the car as it stop-goes in late night traffic, his hands clenching his knees and his teeth clenching in his mouth. If he looks at Seth he think he might vomit, might kiss him, might say those words hanging around in the back of his mouth, the ones he’s been swallowing down for years now, three more words anchoring down into all the chaos inside his head.

Seth sits apart from him, the distance measured in slow breaths and frustrated sighs and stop lights.

He opens his mouth to say something, after nearly twenty minutes of silence — but the driver pulls up to the hotel, and Dean jumps out of the vehicle the second it lurches to a stop. _Bags,_ he thinks. It’s a simple thought, straight forward. _Get the bags._

“Hey, are you—?” Seth asks, once they’re in the elevator.

Two keycards. Two rooms.

Seth doesn’t seem mad, Dean thinks. They’ve been sharing a room more often than not, as often as they dare to come close to admitting that they’re _not_ confronting whatever this thing is between them, as red and new and mottled as the contusion on Seth’s face. He wants to kiss it, Dean thinks, a soft brush of his mouth against Seth’s skin. He balls his fists at his side, banging his knuckles on their suitcases.

_Take care of Seth._

The door to Seth’s hotel room unlocks with a mechanical _snick._

Dean drags in their luggage, leaving it in a haphazard pile near the door; losing his grace, Seth walks heavily, his body dragging along his as he moves past. As if he was shocked, Dean stops, looks up, watches as Seth gingerly lowers himself down onto the bed.

“Your head,” he says.

Seth waves him off, or tries to. There’s an expression on his face that Dean can’t quite place. “Nah it’s — it’s not that bad. I’ll sleep it off.”

Standing there in the half light, he finds himself incapable of knowing what to do with his hands. He rarely thinks about touch; the entire spectrum of it encompasses their lives. There isn’t a moment where he couldn’t describe what Seth’s skin feels like, dimpling under a caress. Or how his body buckles and rolls when it accepts a hit, how his muscles ripple and still as his palm skirts over his chest, a bicep, his thigh.

Seth squints, hands clasped between his open legs.

“Are you going?” he asks, almost cautious.

Dean blinks back at him.

Is he? He realizes he hadn’t thought about _that._ Even if Seth didn’t want to share a bed tonight, he would sleep on the floor just so he could lie awake, make sure his breathing remained even and he wasn’t bleeding into his skull.

“Do you want me to stay?” he asks.

Seth swears under his breath, eyes fluttering closed. Tiredly, he carded a hand through his hair, avoiding the tender side of his head. “Jesus, Dean, why wouldn’t I?”

He shrugs.

“Do _you_ wanna stay?” Seth asks.

Discomfort surfaces in his chest in tiny pinpricks. “Why wouldn’t I?”

“It’s been a rough night,” he says with a shrug, trying to appear unperturbed but too exhausted, too weary to carry the act. “I don’t know what you need after rough nights anymore. If it’s a bar, or if you need to call Roman, or hell, if you need to find someone to pour into your bed and be gone by morning—”

“Really?”

Is this really what Seth thinks, after all this time? After five years and then three, and then this summer and then their bodies, crashing into each other in the ring like two colliding stars, their arms around each other for the first time in celestial eons. Entire worlds had been born, and lived, and died as they fought and found their ways back to each other.

“I don’t _know,_ Dean. You’re not exactly giving me much to — the whole night, since the moment Sheamus and Cesaro took the belts off of us, you’ve barely looked at me.” Seth looks down at his interlaced fingers, and Dean startles, realizing that Seth is holding his own hands so that he wouldn’t reach out for him. “You didn’t exactly get into this by choice.”

“Do you think I wanna _leave?_ After everything, after we got the Shield back together, and you think I’m gonna go somewhere?”

“Roman’s been out almost three weeks now, and even in that time everything’s changed.”

That _everything_ hangs heavily between them. _No, not everything,_ he would say if he was feeling more combative. But now, at this late hour, his body caught up in the press of exertion and time zone calculus and adrenaline — he’s truly not. He doesn’t want to fight with Seth. Hasn’t for months now. But yes _everything,_ maybe, if he considers him and Seth a constant. And he does. He maybe always has. But Roman’s sudden illness, and the Siege and Shane McMahon’s violent insecurities, and the continual rippling effects from everything that happened at TLC. _Everything else._

“You _really_ think I’m gonna just—”

He can’t just think — but maybe that was Seth’s miscalculation in the first place, Dean thinks, back when they were younger and more desperate to prove themselves. When Seth was thinking six steps ahead, seven, ten, a whole hopscotch board of jumps and skips and throwing stones. Like child’s play, he betrayed them.

Before someone _else_ made everything change.

Dean’s heart leaps into his throat, and again, he feels sick.

“Hear me out. Please.” _Please,_ Seth asks again, with just his eyes. Then, hesitating, he unlaces his hands, reaching out for one of Dean’s, pulling him down to sit beside him on the bed. “I’m just saying that… I know you follow your heart. That’s who you are. And I’m the — the Architect. I never do anything without thinking five steps ahead.” He looks almost ashamed, but manages a crooked grin anyway. “Well, tonight Sheamus and Cesaro were six steps ahead, and we lost. I don’t know where my head is. Especially, since...” With testing fingers, he palpates the edge of the bruise. “Yeah, that hurts.”

Dean takes Seth’s hand, pulling it back down into the space between them.

“So you wanna know where my heart is?” he asks, slowly, so that the words _I love you_ don’t just tumble out after them.

“Yeah.”

Seth nods, looking like a man desperate for something to make sense.

“You really don’t know?”

From his mouth escapes a soft laugh, a low reverberation of his careless cackle. Self-deprecating, and guilty. “No, Dean. Most days I’m not even sure I could pick my own heart out of a line-up. I have complete plausible deniability when it comes to my emotions. I usually rely on you to tell me what I’m feeling.” Dean feels the confusion on his own face, and Seth shakes his head, just barely. “Not… with words. But I know I can follow your lead. You have a good one in there.”

Gently, he taps the pad of his forefinger over Dean’s sternum, eyes earnest and shining in the low light. And that smile, and those teeth, and everything he’s ever loved about Seth when he’s being soft and vulnerable, not hiding behind the veneer of the brash knight, the clever kingslayer.

Dean doesn’t know what to say.

His head’s a mess. It always has been. There are moments, when his emotions run high enough and the stakes are just as high, when he’s in the ring or fighting by his brothers’ sides — there are moments where the words reach around all that he’s feeling and he can get them out, make them neat and orderly, make them make sense.

“I hate myself so much I could be sick right now.”

Seth’s brows furrow together. “What?”

“I let you down.”

“I let _you_ down.” Still gentle, but now firm, Seth frames his face in his hands, stroking his thumbs over his cheekbones as he brings their foreheads together. “We’ve lost titles before. Why does it _feel_ like this?”

Faces so close, he might close his eyes. But he doesn’t. Seth’s face slides out of focus, but he doesn’t close his eyes. The air between them is a careful exchange of breath, their mouths lingering close, but neither daring to move. Not closer, not apart.

He just wants Seth to feel okay. He just wants to feel okay, tonight.

There’ll be a rematch, Dean thinks, maybe next week before Survivor Series or after. But maybe it doesn’t matter, even if it does, because they’ve missed so much together already, punching past landmarks and anniversaries and climbing up and then falling off of cages together. Breaking bones, and brains, and hearts, and he remembers a time where the words did reach, when he could think of nothing but Seth’s destruction and his own, but always together.

Even when he hated him, he stayed.

“We’re gonna burn together,” he says, final. He cups the side of Seth’s head, fingers stroking over his scalp through his damp hair. Holds him in place as he tilts his head just enough to press his lips to the mound of swelling. A breath, more than a kiss.

“But…”

“No. That’s it.”

_Don’t you fucking get it?_ A single thought. A clear thought. He changes the angle, brings their mouths together. A breath, more than a kiss. The skin of their lips cling to each other when he pulls away.

Seth’s eyes are clear; he nods.

“We burn.”

**Author's Note:**

> Comments and kudos are super appreciated.


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